"Howl," starring James Franco as a young Allen Ginsberg, is more of a sketch than a fully developed work of art. It doesn't dig very deep, but it does capture nicely some of the essence of what made Ginsberg's poem "Howl" (1956) a masterpiece and such a lightning rod for controversy.
It also effectively and warmly explores some of the life challenges that propelled the young man from New Jersey to write such explosive and iconoclastic poetry. Chief among these, the film suggests, was the fact that Ginsberg had fallen in love with a man, his college roommate, Jack Kerouac, who himself would go on to become a literary star.
Much of the howling that the poem depicts, it would seem, was that of gay men trying to find ways to resist the oppression that strangled them morning, noon and night. "Howl" (the film) to a large degree presents Ginsberg as a courageous pioneer and grandfather of the modern gay rights movement.
In this way, the film is both moving and predictable. We've seen this kind of heroic treatment a million times before. Far more interesting would have been a consideration of the negative traits of Ginsberg alongside the courageous. Hagiography is so easy to do that I'm not sure a filmmaker of Rob Epstein's caliber should lower himself to traffic in it. (Epstein won an Oscar for 1984's "The Times of Harvey Milk," one of the greatest documentaries of all time.)
Ginsberg himself would surely have preferred a more balanced treatment. In a set of personal conversations I had with Ginsberg in 1987, he said: "I'm an asshole and a coward just like everybody else."
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